activism

No. 1: At 19, when she was in college, she watched “Slumdog Millionaire,” the Oscar-winning love story/adventure set in the slums of Mumbai. Upset by the depiction of poverty she had never experienced, she decided to travel there and help. Using the money saved from her bat mitzvah, she booked a one-way flight that night and spent the summer working with an anti-trafficking NGO.

As the executive director of a national nonprofit organization that fights for class equality, Jessie Spector proves that young doesn’t necessarily mean naive. “I look younger than my age — I’m often told that I look like a 15-year-old,” she said. “Being young and looking young, I often have to struggle to be taken seriously.”

The experience of an intellectually serious student in the 21st century is a lonely one. On college campuses, the greatest passions soar not in response to encountering Plato or Hayek for the first time, but in response to calls for censorship, “safe” spaces, and the stifling of debate. In the name of human rights, justice, and liberty, the majority of students on campus today believe themselves to be the teachers: they are sure that history up until just recently was entirely orientalist and racist and cruel, and they know — boy, do they know — which causes are right and which are wrong. In this environment the traditional goal of education: knowledge, has been replaced with a new goal: solidarity. The desire to know has been tucked under the desire to reform, to defy, to break.